I am aware that the usual solution for this is to get one of these NOAC cartdriges. Btw, considering that the SNES has a (somewhat) backward-compatible CPU, maybe a pure "software" solution is also possible. Indeed, after some searching i came across this: Korean SFC multi-cart 20 in 1 NES Questions: - is the ROM dump is compatible with the SED ? - can it be hacked to play different NES games?
Reading up on it, these are simply conversions, so similar to Super Mario All-Stars. EDIT: To elaborate, what they've done is rewrite the games from scratch to run on SNES hardware. You'd have to write the games from scratch.
I don't think they were completely rewritten from scratch, just disassembled and hacked a bit... btw i've found some interesting old discussions about hacked NES ROMs turned into SNES: http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?t=8124 http://www.neoflash.com/forum/index.php?topic=6023.0 I've just tried some of the "AS ..." ROMs by Anthrox and they running fine in bsnes, probably they will run fine in SED. Too bad they are missing the audio!
There is no magic way to run NES games on the SNES. The less complex games which you see as "AS NES Hacks" are easier to hack to get working somewhat well. But these are very primitive games. And as you noted, they lack any real sound since that would either require a NSF emulator or a completely new SNES sound program. Someone did make a NSF emulator for SNES. However I'm not sure how exactly it works and if it could be used in a NES conversion to provide good sound emulation. But I do know that beyond simple games you run into a much bigger problem with memory mappers. The SNES doesn't have any way to easily handle this for complex mappers like MMC-3. That's why you don't see a hack of a game like Mega Man 3 or Batman to play on the SNES.
you are right about that... while the SNES CPU can run in backward compatibility mode, the sound chip is completely different, so the NES audio cannot be played directly. Another possible solution could be a SNES flashcart providing a 2A03 chip, what do you think? Still better than using those NOAC cartdriges...
Maybe someone could hack basic NES ROMs to work on the SD2SNES and use MSU-1 for audio. You would have to convert the NSF to wave. I'm pretty sure this would still be a fairly complex project though. It's probably easier to learn how to create your own SNES game based on an NES game.
Using a clone system actually is better than trying to attempt to hack games. The clones actually are reasonably accurate, but not perfect. MSU-1 is not going to help with audio unless you just want to play a song. It wouldn't help for sound effects. If you want to see a cool example of NES games running on another system there are very impressive conversions of NES games to the PC-Engine/TurboGrafx 16.
